Wipes made with natural or man made fibre in the form of paper tissue, woven and non-woven cloth and combinations thereof are known and used extensively as surface treatment tools for cleaning and drying but they suffer from several limitations that this invention addresses.
An unfortunate property of many fibre-based products is that when wetted they collapse into a dense wet mass and are then difficult to use. In essence, such fibre-based products have a low wet compressive modulus, low bending modulus and low wet resiliency. Generally fibre tools have good fluid absorbency, adequate tensile strength and are soft and flexible. Fibre wipes are useful for removing dirt, for example large clumps of dirt can be individually removed by using the wipe rather like a glove and wrapping it around the clump. At the other extreme wipes are also effective at removing fine dust by entrapment and electrostatic attraction. There is however what might be termed an intermediate size of dirt, larger than air-mobile dust particles but too small to be picked up individually as clumps, which is difficult to deal with using fibre wipes because the particles cannot penetrate between fibres. This intermediate dirt often contains concentrations of particles, like soil or sand, wear debris, grit and crumbs. These limitations are encountered in domestic, institutional and industrial cleaning as well as in personal care cosmetics and medical uses when removing dirt either wet or dry.
Softness, strength, absorbency, bulk and the like have been the focus of improvements of fibre and particularly non-woven wipes leading to denser fibre packing. Efforts to reduce the density of fibre near the surface to facilitate entrapment of dirt at the surface have had only limited success because the dirt is not positively removed from the vicinity of the surface, risking recontamination. Another approach is to make the non-woven wipe with two layers, the operable layer with a plurality of holes into which particulate is expected to collect during rubbing and be entrapped by exposed areas if a tacky layer used also to join the sheets together, the design lacks positive displacement of particulate from the surface an is less than fully satisfactory.
What is needed is a tool with the means of scraping up dirt, either wet or dry and including particulate matter and removing it and storing it away from the surface so that is cannot re-contaminate the surface.